Deepening crazihood at the National Review

Anyone who has been attending over the years to this Chris Bill Buckley-founded conservative enterprise is bound to be a tad disconcerted at how bizarre, indeed how loony it has become.

Last Saturday, Victor David Hanson wrote a column packed with the usual warped and exaggerated (and false) claims regarding “postmodernism” in universities and how it informs liberal notions. I heartily recommend that you read it as it’s a classic example of the genre. And then, there’s the final graph…

In that vein, Obama is almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners, whose grievances Obama has long studied (and perhaps in large part entertained), and whose estrangement alone offers opportunity for Obama’s sophisticated multicultural insight and singular narcissistic magnanimity.

Yesterday, we find Andy McCarthy explaining the reality he perceives…

The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez…

It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters…

Do these people actually believe what they write? It’s a tad boggling to think they might but these passages above aren’t unsual for those writers except in the degree of extremism and detachment from reality. I suppose we ought to temper, somewhat, our dismay acknowledging that the NR is now most fundamentally a propagandist endeavor which has the goals of furthering Republican electoral opportunities and diminishing Democratic power. Lies and exaggerations and quarter-truths aren’t problematic for a propagandist, they are the tools of the trade.

But the problem these folks have is that the last eight years have pretty much decapitated their credibility with anyone except for a small coterie of diehard ideologues and the excited-by-paranoid-fantasies constituency that they have helped to create and foster. As their power and influence decreases, they are doing that thing that not-so-smart travelers in a foreign land often do when their language is not understood – repeat the same words but way louder and with more extreme gestures. Of course, the further you head in this direction, the more likely it is you are going to look like (and become) that wide-eyed lunatic in the park screaming about commies or parasitic aliens in your brain.

Which brings us to Thomas Sowell. Here’s what he is eager to alert us to this morning…

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

In what sort of mental universe, one wonders, does this man reside?

Perhaps the most frightening prospect for the truly paranoid individual is that others will perceive that he or she is a truly paranoid individual. Sowell, McCarthy, Hanson and a few others over at the National Review are clearly in a state of fright these days.

2 responses to “Deepening crazihood at the National Review”

Bernie,
I should have asked you first, but I went ahead and copied your assessment on Able2Know’s thread on American conservatism. I agree that Sowell’s article is bizarre. Some posters at Able2Know are trying to defend Sowell’s essay.